Facebook is reportedly expanding its fact-checker network for the Indian market. Apparently, the company has added five new partners for reviewing news stories on its platform for checking facts and to rate accuracy in Hindi, English, Marathi, Malayalam and Telugu, in a bid to grow its third-party fact-checking program in the nation.
Further from the reports, these new partners, Fact Crescendo, Newsmobile, Factly, Vishvas.news, and India Today Group are allegedly certified through a non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network and would join the existing partners AFP and BOOM Live.
Fact-checker of Facebook is seemingly aimed at reducing false news circulation. It would also remove fake accounts, enhance news literacy, along with disrupting spammers’ financial incentives. As per Facebook the distribution of a story is significantly reduced, as it does not appear on the top in News Feed when a story is rated as false by the fact-checker.
Sources familiar with the matter cited that this would further result in preventing any hoax from spreading. If a story is once rated as false, the platform would reduce its distribution by 80%. Even domains and pages which repeatedly share false news would also witness reduced distribution and removed capability of monetizing and advertising.
Manish Khanduri, Facebook India’s News Partnership Head, revealed that the platform is committed to fight the spreading of false news, specially before the General Election campaign season of 2019. A way of doing that is through growing the platform’s partnership with third-party fact-checkers. The platform has seven partners around the nation covering six languages, that would rate and review the accuracy of stories on the platform, he confirmed.
Product Manager, Antonia Woodford, explained in a post that the company has built a machine learning model similar to its work for articles, to utilize different engagement signals, such as feedback from people on Facebook, for identifying potentially false content. The platform then sends those videos and photos to fact-checkers for their review, or fact-checkers could also surface content on their own.